2026-01-23

Workflow for text data in Atlascine

📖 📚 🔖 Following increasing interest, we have added a page to the wiki which provides instructions for working with text-based media (such as novels or interview transcripts) in Atlascine, without an accompanying media (audio or video) file. Although at the moment it is more of a workaround and requires some manual processing, we are working on simplifying this process and perhaps eventually integrating native support for text-based media in Atlascine.

2025-10-16

Atelier d'initiation à l'art avec Atlascine

Lea Kabiljo - professeure en enseignment des arts à l'université Laval - organise un atelier le 14 novembre 2025 à 13:30 lors du congrès annuel de l'AQESAP qui se déroule dans la ville de Québec. Au cours de cet atelier elle initiera les participantes à l'utilisation des ressources numériques pour l'éducation à l'art et aux pratiques artistiques. Cet atelier sera structuré autour d'exemples issus de l'Atlas Raconte-Moi Riopelle conçu avec Atlascine. Plus de détails à propos de cet atelier.

2025-05-23

Atlascine at the CAG-CCA Conference

Several projects developed with Atlascine were presented at the joint annual conference of the Canadian Association of geographers and Canadian Cartographic Association that took place in Ottawa this week. Kelley Ann O'Rourke presented the Histories of Saint-Colomban Cemetery atlas, Lea Kabiljo presentend the Tell Me about Riopelle atlas, Sepideh Shahamati presentend the Intangible Heritage of Parc-Extension atlas, and Cameron Brubacher presented his maps of historical Quebecois novels (not available to the public for copyright reasons).

2025-03-21

New publication on Atlascine

"Story Mapping Praxis to Principles: Learning from the Atlascine Project" has just been published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers. This paper discusses the history and the features of Atlascine as well as story mapping principles we have learned throughout this project. If you don’t have access to this journal, you can read the accepted manuscript version here.

2025-02-10

New "Histories of Saint-Colomban Cemetery" Atlas

The Histories of Saint-Colomban Cemetery Atlas presents the results of a deep exploration of this cemetery in Québec (Canada). While the first settlers arrived from Ireland as early as 1819, this project focuses on the years 1836–1847, mirroring the establishment of Saint-Colomban Parish and Cemetery in 1836. This research goes beyond the surface, to uncover the missing monuments, their hidden stories and their forgotten memories, as way to reflect on the Irish diaspora in Canada in the mid-19th century. Multiple sources of information have been compiled and cross-referenced to identify missing graves such as parish records, field exploration of broken gravestones, as well as interviews with descendants and researchers. 20 of these interviews have been mapped with Atlascine, offering the possibility of listening to these stories, connecting tombstones in Saint-Colomban with villages in Ireland and contributing to a better understanding of the early Irish diaspora in Quebec.

This atlas has been designed by Kelley O’Rourke as part of her Master’s thesis entitled “Grave Matters: Mapping the Untold Stories of the Saint-Colomban Cemetery” (O’Rourke 2024).

2024-11-14

Presentation of the Atlacine at Spatial Humanities 2024

Sébastien Caquard in collaboration with Emory Shaw, presented Atlascine at the 5th Spatial Humanities conference that took place in Bamberg (Germany) on September 25th to 27th 2024.

In this presentation they discussed how Atlascine addresses ethical issues raised by the mapping of stories of violence and genocide, methodological issues raised by the mapping of stories more generally, technological issues raised by the navigation between and within stories and maps, and theoretical issues raised in contemporary cartography.

Presentation of the Atlas "Raconte-Moi Riopelle" at the IVLA Conference in San Diego

Lea Kabiljo, Assistant Professor at the School of Art at Laval University (Quebec) presented The "Raconte-moi Riopelle/Tell me about Riopelle" initiative at the 56th Annual Conference of the International Visual Literacy Association in San Diego (USA).

The "Raconte-moi Riopelle/Tell me about Riopelle" initiative explores the life and legacy of Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle through a series of raw, unedited oral history interviews with those who knew him. This approach emphasizes the significance of visual, non-verbal cues in these narratives, thereby enhancing archival practices by capturing nuances often missed in edited content. Central to this endeavor is Atlascine. By presenting unedited interviews and leveraging Atlascine, "Raconte-moi Riopelle" transforms traditional archival methods and democratizes the interpretation of Riopelle’s life and art. This strategy challenges standard narrative constructs, allowing for a more inclusive and varied understanding of the artist and his legacy.

2024-08-29

Literary Mapping with Atlascine

Cameron Brubacher has presented his Honors thesis entitled ‘Emotional Cartography: A Geocritical Analysis of Montréal’s Mid-20th Century Novels’ at the Canadian Association of Geographers conference, held at Memorial University in St. John’s, NL, as part of a session exploring creative GIS methodologies entitled ‘Mapping the Edges of Inclusivity’ on Saturday, August 17th.

Combining literary analysis and web-mapping, this project visualizes the emotional depictions of urban spaces as portrayed in two novels set in 1940s Montréal; Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion and Michel Tremblay’s La grosse femme d’à côté est enceinte. Following a close reading and analysis, the Atlascine platform was used to create an interactive web-map which visualizes the positive and negative emotional spaces of the two novels. This cartographic representation confirmed patterns in character’s feelings associated with certain areas of the city, and calls for the continued development of such ‘qualitative’ uses of GIS and mapping software, with the possibility of using methods from the fields of digital humanities and literary geography. The maps he has developped are not accessible publickly because of copyright restrictions.

2024-06-14

Atlas Exhibition in Kigali

The Atlas of Rwandan Life Stories is currently being exhibited in Rwanda at the Kigali Genocide Memorial. You can read more on the exhibition here, Browse photos of the event, and here's an explanation in kinyarwanda.

2024-02-16

Presentation of the Atlas of Intangible Heritage of Parc-Extension at McGill

Sepideh Shahamati will be presenting her Atlas of Intangible Heritage of Parc-Extension at McGill University on Friday Feb. 16, 2024 in the class entitled "Narratives of Quebec: Exploring Identities from Communities to Neighbourhoods". Sébastien Caquard will join her to present the Atlascine project.

2023-11-23

Lancement de l'atlas Raconte moi Riopelle!

L'Atlas Raconte-Moi Riopelle présente une vingtaine de récits partagés par celles et ceux qui ont croisé la route et l'œuvre de Jean Paul Riopelle. Dans cet atlas développé avec Atlascine, les cartes permettent de visualiser la géographie de ces récits, mais aussi de naviguer entre eux de manière à offrir de nouvelles possibilités d'écoute.

2023-10-13

Launch of the Atlascine Website

The new website dedicated to the Atlascine project has been officially launched! This website's goal is to provide a dedicated space for sharing information, news, content, ideas, and tips related to the Atlascine platform. Over the past few years, our main objective has been to collaborate with our partners from the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Center (GCRC) at Carleton University to completely redesign the previous version of the platform (which you can learn more on in the About page) and to support researchers interested in developing their own atlases using Atlascine (visit the Atlas page for examples). With this website, we are now ready to make this platform more accessible to anyone interested in visualizing stories, showcasing fascinating interviews, or creating their own maps and atlases. Much appreciation and thanks to Emory Shaw for building this website!